Page 3 of Duplicity

Each sentence is a blow to the stomach. I have never in my life felt so powerless. So sickened. Every single day, I watch my daughter, so small and frail for her age, navigate the art of surviving life rather than thriving on it because one of her body’s most basic functions is compromised. I’m forced to decline her pleas for gym classes and ballet classes. I’m the mother who hands over medical fact sheets to any parent who hosts her for a playdate.

She needs a new fucking pulmonary valve, and she needs it now, and I don’t have the hundreds of thousands of pounds required to get it for her privately. So I’m stuck here, hopelessly dependent on our overstretched National Health Service to shuffle us along in its never-ending queue of equally deserving, equally sick children until we one day reach the front.

‘I know how frustrating it is,’ the doctor tells me softly. ‘Perhaps this is something you and your partner can discuss, so that if emergency surgery is the only option, you feel better prepared for?—’

‘There is no partner,’ I say quickly. ‘I mean, Tabby’s father’s not in the picture. It’s just me and her.’

I swear the compassion on her face ratchets up a notch. ‘Of course. I apologise. This is a lot to bear alone. We have support services available to the parents of children with these conditions. I can give you a leaflet…’ She trails off.

I don’t need a leaflet.

I need a Hail Mary.

Such an unfortunate turn of phrase when the only possibleHail Maryavailable to me is to sell my soul to some guy who may as well be the Devil himself for the price he’ll demand.

But God knows, I’ll pay it.

I pull out my phone and shoot off a few texts.

At the hospital

Tabs had another blue spell

And Dean fired me for leaving early

Looks like Seraph is the only card I have left to play

CHAPTER 2

Marlowe

Six months ago, my best friend and part-time fairy godmother, and Tabby’sactualgodmother, handed me a brochure whose contents felt more forbidden than that godforsaken apple in the Garden of Eden.

Because that brochure containedhopewithin its glossy pages.

Hope in the form of non-invasive, laparoscopic heart surgeries by the most experienced paediatric cardiothoracic surgeons in the world.

Hope that can only be a reality for the lucky children whose parents have six figures to drop on the noble cause of making their kids’ medical worries go away, just like that.

I was pissed off when Athena showed it to me, and I was even more pissed off when she offered to pay for the whole shebang with money she’d earned in the hardest way possible up until last month: by having sex with rich, powerful dickheads whenever they wanted a piece of her.

No fucking way. I don’t know how she’s done it all these years, even if she’s a nympho to my nun on the sexuality scale. Besides, if I let her fix this for me, then I honestly don’t know what would be left of me.

Mum. Carer. Provider. Those roles consumed the rest of me years ago. They’re all I am these days, and I’m damn well not going to let anyone else do my job for me.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that a friend and fellow escort of hers, Sophia, casually suggested thatIdo a stint with their agency in order to fund a US-based valve replacement for Tabs. It was a solution so improbable, so unhinged, and so outrageously pragmatic that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

The women on Seraph’s books are full-service executive assistants who get paid seven figures a year by their bosses for the privilege of fucking them whenever they (their bosses, that is) want. And while I’m the first to admit that for the past four years the merest thought of my best friend enduring that career has given me hives, the concept ofmeenduring it, for a few months, anyway, has grown less outlandish the more I let it percolate.

If you remove the following small details—that I haven’t actually had sex since my married music professor seduced me, knocked me up, and dumped me at university, or that my sexy skills would barely warrant someone slipping me fifty quid afterwards, or that Athena is so fiercely protective that she won’t even discuss it with me—then the dilemma I have is so achingly simple that, really, there’s no dilemma at all.

My daughter needs her pulmonary valve replaced yesterday.

And it is technically within my power to take action and fund that replacement in the safest, most expedient, and least invasive way possible.

I saytechnically, because the chances of Seraph taking me on its books are borderline zero. Without Athena’s magical powers of persuasion, anyway.

‘Over my dead body.’ She takes a sip of the excellent white wine she’s brought along and flicks her perfect, glossy waves over her shoulder.

---